It would definetely mean much less money but it would definetely pull a heck of a lot of people over to this platform.

Are you kidding?

Um Thronebreaker is GOG exclusive... so yea pretty sure they considered it.

I can definitely see them do a timed-exclusive with CP2077 to bring even more people to the light side.

timed-exclusive -> light side, does not compute.

The end justifies the means.
And it'd be just timed-exclusive after all.

The problem is that they lack proper support for other languages. And ending support for PT not too long ago doesn't look especially good either. So considering that, they are actually regressing instead of expanding. Doing a release like that would thus be a pretty bad idea.

Meanwhile, Steam is happily expanding, got into the large Korean and Chinese market and have forum implementation for games these days. GOG, on the other hand, does nothing, despite not having first-mover advantage. It would need to play catch-up which it isn't doing. So my guess is that either GOG gave up becoming an actual contender or they are more incompetent than I thought.

2077 is far too expensive of a project to be even a timed exclusive and I don't see them gambling it the same way Valve did back in the day. Thronebreaker is more of a budget title so that being an exclusive makes sense.

What's wrong with timed exclusives?

The thing is that with most people being so impatient these days it might just need a day or even a couple hours of GOG.com-exclusivity to pull a considerable amount of people and in the process maybe win them over for the DRM-Free cause.
On the PC platform at least.

Exactamundo.

I sort of agree (it's similar to Denuvo/DRM in that the DRM only needs to work for a few weeks or months, during that initial sales period, because people are impatient and will just buy the game if they have the money) but I don't know if CDP wants to take that chance with such a big game. Yet.

It really wouldn't be that huge of a gamble

I'm sure you can find exact figures on the internet, but from what I remember for any AAA game sold on console and PC the Consoles account for over 70% of income.

Witcher 3 sold 60%+ copies via GoG/Physical

At absolute worst they're looking at risking 15% of the audience against an increased customer base for GoG and a huge PR boost.

If The Witcher series wouldn't have been released on Steam it would never become big as it did and we probably wouldn't have W3 (at least not in its current form).

In the business world having your IP spread past one platform is the best thing to do for revenue. Why sell in one place when you can have it everywhere else and Quadruple sales? I know for a fact if other companies like blizzard did that, there sales will skyrocket but they have the Oh this is our games our platform only mentality. Lost sales that could have been.

And you have to remember another thing. Not everyone wants to buy games on multiple platforms, if witcher 3 did not go past GOG I am sure it would not have had the sales figures it did today. thus having future games with higher production costs will be less a reality.